**Source: CW vol. 21**

Famine again—as before, in old Russia, before 1905. Crop failures occur everywhere, but only in Russia do they lead to desperate calamities, to the starvation of millions of peasants. And the present disaster, as even the supporters of the government and landowners are forced to admit, exceeds in scale the famine of 1891.

A population of 30 million people has suffered in the most severe degree. Peasants are selling off their allotments, livestock, and everything that can be sold for a pittance. They are selling girls—the worst times of slavery are returning. The people's disaster immediately reveals the true essence of our entire so-called "civilized" social system: in other forms, in a different guise, with a different "culture," this system is the old slavery, the slavery of millions of toilers for the wealth, luxury, and parasitism of the "upper" ten thousand. Penal labor, as always among slaves, and the complete indifference of the rich to the fate of slaves: previously they directly starved slaves to death, directly took women into the master's harems, directly subjected slaves to torture. Now the peasants have been robbed—by means of all the stratagems, conquests, and progress of civilization—robbed so thoroughly that they are bloated from hunger, eating orache, eating lumps of mud instead of bread, suffering from scurvy and dying in agony. Meanwhile, Russian landowners, with Nicholas II at their head, and Russian capitalists are raking in millions of rubles: the owners of entertainment establishments in the capitals say they have not done such brisk business in a long time. It has been a long time since there has been such brazen, unbridled display of luxury as there is now in the large cities.

Why in Russia, and only in Russia, have these medieval famines persisted alongside the newest progress of civilization? Because the new vampire—capital—is descending upon Russian peasants under conditions in which the peasants are bound hand and foot by feudal landowners, by feudal, landlord, and tsarist autocracy. Robbed by the landowners, crushed by the arbitrariness of officials, ensnared by networks of police prohibitions, cavils, and violence, bound by the latest protection of guards, priests, and zemstvo chiefs, the peasants are as defenseless against natural disasters and against capital as the savages of Africa. Only in wild countries can one now encounter such wholesale death from famine as in Russia in the twentieth century.

But the famine in contemporary Russia, following so many boastful speeches by the tsarist government about the benefits of the new land settlement, about the progress of homestead farming, and so forth, will not pass without teaching the peasants much. The famine will destroy millions of lives, but it will also destroy the remnants of the wild, barbarous, slavish faith in the tsar, which stands in the way of understanding the necessity and inevitability of revolutionary struggle against the tsarist monarchy, against the landowners. Only in the abolition of landlord land ownership can peasants find a way out. Only in the overthrow of the tsarist monarchy, this mainstay of the landowners, lies the path toward any semblance of human life, toward deliverance from famines, from hopeless destitution.

To explain this is the duty of every conscious worker, the duty of every conscious peasant. This is our principal task in connection with the famine. To organize, where possible, collections from workers for the benefit of starving peasants and to transmit this money through Social Democratic deputies—this, of course, is also one of the necessary undertakings.

*Rabochaya Gazeta* No. 8, March 17 (30), 1912

Printed from the text of *Rabochaya Gazeta*